User Testing & Research with Optimal Workshop

Optimal Workshop is a suite of tools for researchers and IAs to improve the UX of their products. In my role as Web Presence Manager at Century College, I designed, administered, and analyzed the results of several tests/studies.

Working in higher education, there isn’t a large budget for…well, any part of the college, but when it comes to the website, it’s pretty minimal. And when it comes to user experience and research, it’s practically nil. So it’s a good thing that there are a lot of free or low-cost options out there.

During the web redesign, we turned to Optimal Workshop as a starting point for many of our research projects. While the free versions are admittedly limited in the number of responses allowed, they did tend to give us a good idea of which direction to pursue. Using that, we then created further strategy to test those different directions.